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2011: In Which I Freelanced More Than Ever

In Writing, Year in Review on December 31, 2011 at 12:27 pm

Earlier this year, I was at a writing workshop, and someone asked me a fairly innocuous question. They asked me “Are you a writer?”

“Sort of,” I said, “it’s not my main job. It only supplements my income.”

The questioner was kind of surprised. “Wait,” they said, “you make money?”

Well, yes. Not very much of it and not frequently enough, but yes, that does happen sometime. I do not like calling myself a “writer.” For some reason, the word seems loaded and uncomfortable, and I have this weird feeling that if I were to say to people “I’m a writer,” people would instantly think of some Hemingway wannabe staring intently at a keyboard, not actually producing anything. You know, Ewan McGregor’s character in Moulin Rouge. A guy with vague, lofty ambitions who is unable to actually translate them into anything at all, and wants to have written more than he wants to write.

There is also the tendency to think of “writer” as in the same category as “rock star,” “astronaut,” or “ballerina;” dreamy jobs that technically do exist, but that do not abound in any significant numbers.

So, I’ve been looking for lots of Plan Bs. Something else. A “real” job. However, I feel most satisfied when I can sit down, pound out an article, and actually call it real work. While I have looked into grad school, this past year I’ve been most excited by the writing jobs that I’ve gotten. This spring I wrote some news for a local publication called About Face Magazine, I ever-so-briefly worked for Portland Picks for Men before they went under, did regular work for Metromix, an arts and leisure site, blogged for the Daily Journal of Commerce, and wrote a feature and began blogging for the Portland Mercury. The day job, Portland Walking Tours, has also picked me up to work as a researcher and content provider. Not a bad collection of bylines, and I have a few other projects on deck.

I like this. I like this a great deal. If I knew I could make a living at it, I would make a living as a writer and journalist. There are real, actual people who do this, who research and report and write full time. I would like to be one of them. Given the poor economy, the state of the newspaper industry, and the general non-scarcity of information, though, I still don’t know if this is wholly and completely possible. I really, really want it to be, though. A local newspaper has now interviewed me twice about being a full-time reporter, and, despite knowing that any newspaper in the country could keel over dead and bankrupt at any moment, I’m ready to say yes if the offer me the job.

2011 has made me all the more want to discard backup plans, and just dive into trying to be a full time wordsmith. Even as I type this, there’s an uncashed freelancing check sitting on the table next to me, and that small amount of professional success only makes me fantasize more about pursuing my dream job. I want to be able to say “I’m a writer” without any kind of reservations, asterisks, or caveats, but I’ll only do that when it is, in fact, my full-time job.

It’s not impossible. Not probable, certainly, but being a professional would not violate the laws of reality. Let’s see what happens in 2012.

Shut Up and Show Me

In Movies on December 27, 2011 at 10:19 am

One of my favorite movies of all time is the director’s cut of Blade Runner. The director’s cut is a moody, dark tone-poem that lets the stark beauty of its setting and characters speak for itself. The theatrical version, though, is terrible. It’s a far different movie for one very important reason- the theatrical version of Blade Runner features voice-overs that explain precisely what is happening on screen, and it utterly kills the mood that the sets, music, costumes, and the rest of it try so hard to create. The theatrical version tells, and fails. The director’s cut shows, and succeeds.

Walk into any writing class and one of the first things that the instructor will tell you is show, don’t tell. That’s repeated over and over again to the point where it’s become somewhat of a hackneyed phrase that everyone says, and few people actually think about. However, it is utterly and totally true.

Yesterday I saw The Artist, a film about a movie actor in the late 1920s and early 1930s who weathers the transition from silent films to talkies. The central self-aware gimmick of The Artist, is that it itself is a silent movie (mostly). Most of the characterization is told with the exaggerated, broad body language of the silent era. The lead does a heroic amount of acting with his eyebrows and mustache, affecting the sort of big, visible facial expressions that can convey emotions without saying a word. The film is gimmicky, but it’s deft and charming enough that it works. Despite the leaden-sounding title and potentially highfalutin’ concept (being a modern silent film) it’s actually extraordinarily light on its feet and charming. It’s a movie that revels in the action thrillers, swashbuckling hijinks, and undiluted showmanship of old Hollywood. Give it a watch. (Bonus: One of the characters is probably the best movie dog I’ve ever seen. Normally I can’t stand animals or children in movies, as they are not presented as developed characters, but rather as emotional cheap-shots. The dog in The Artist, though, is an adorable little micro-badass with awesome comic timing.)

Coming out of The Artist, I immediately thought of Wall-E and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Neither are silent movies in that they have title cards and whatnot, but, like The Artist, both are films that tell a substantial part of their stories through body language, facial expressions, and action. Wall-E features nonvocal robot characters, and Apes features, well, lots of apes. Like The Artist, both films are also excellent. They show, they don’t tell.

Another two examples I’ll mention: I’m currently playing through Shadow of the Colossus, an extraordinarily empathy-ridden, sad video game that has practically no dialogue. I also recently re-watched Toy Story 3, and was brought to tears by the scene at the end where the main characters bravely stare death in the face, but don’t say a word. The dialogue in the Toy Story movies is extremely well done, but at that emotionally pivotal moment the screenwriters and director knew that the right thing to do was to not say a word, and let Woody  and Buzz’s encounter with death speak for itself.

What makes all of these media good is that they know that they have multiple ways of communicating with the audience. Everything I mentioned above all uses character design, movement, a cocked eyebrow here, an agape mouth there, to say something. What’s more, the media in question trust in that communication style. They don’t show a smiling guy and then have someone say “he looks happy” or add any kind of intelligence-insulting exposition. They don’t attempt to validate nonverbal communication with wordy explanation, or impede on the emotional environment by spelling out what’s going on.

Media that show rather than tell are confident, witty, and have a diversity of ways in which they connect with the audience. Media that do that are better, and more interesting, be they films about movie stars or stories of sentient robots. Whatever genre, they take the advice of every college writing instructor ever, and it turns out to not a tired truism, but utterly worthwhile.

Thoughts on End Notes Vs Foot Notes

In Books, Rants, Writing on December 12, 2011 at 8:11 pm

Right now I’m reading a book that I quite enjoy. It has end notes. The end notes contain citations, so you can see where the author got his information. I’m fine with that. In fact, that’s something I want in pretty much any nonfiction book.

However, the end notes also contain asides and parenthetical remarks on the part of the author. This drives me utterly mad. When I see a very small number in the text, there is no way for me to tell whether or not following it to the back of the book will lead to additional thoughts from the author, or just a citation. Nine times out of ten it’s just a citation that I can ignore for the moment, but every so often it’s additional authorial remarks that I actually want to read. Looking at the main text, though, I have no idea what I’ll find at the back of the book. I just have to look.

I really, really, really, really hate this. It’s annoying, it’s lazy, and (worst of all) it’s an inconvenience to the reader that can be very easily remedied. Citations should be at the back of the book, and marked with end notes. They should be there for the reader, but shoved away into a different clump of pages on not intruding into the main body of text. Authorial asides, however, should be marked with an asterisk or dagger and on the same page as the main text. That way, the reader can easily glance down at them, and not have to futz around in the citation section for other stuff the author might have to say.

It boggles my mind that any book would intermingle authorial asides in with citations. It’s stupid, it’s aggravating, it has an easy solution, and any editor that sends the reader scampering back to the end of the book every half page is an awful human, and should be slapped in the face with a frozen tuna until they recant their various sins against reading.

A special exception can be made for Infinite Jest, though. Infinite Jest is cool.

In Which I Fail Spectacularly at NaNoWriMo

In Writing on December 6, 2011 at 1:38 pm

National Novel Writing Month has destroyed me. I set out at the beginning of November with the intent of writing a 50,000 novel. In the back of my mind, I knew I would fail. And then, giving into subconscious worries and fears, I did precisely that. When November ended, I had less than half of my novel finished.

I went into the whole thing with a certain lack of commitment. While I do have some aspirations when it comes to fiction (someone once said that “aspiring novelist” is a synonym for “human”) I’ve often thought that if I do ever write anything long-form, it will be nonfiction. (For example, the travel memoir that I’ve been trying to unsuccessfully sell/finish for the past two years.) At present, I’ve gotten some nice gigs writing about architecture and built industry in Portland, and I’ve done the odd article about things blowing up. I feel comfortable with nonfiction- after all, with nonfiction the fascinating story is already there. The only thing that a writer has to do is find a way to overlay their own fascination onto the pre-existing facts, and there you go. It comes naturally to me, especially when I’m writing about something that I really enjoy.

For NaNoWriMo, I knew that I would have to create a whole lot of written content very quickly. I chose to do a what I thought was a straightforward genre story- a murder mystery, but with vampires. I figured that I’d be able to put together a plot fairly quickly, and could have a lot of fun with the exposition how my vampires worked. Coming up with the story was pretty easy- I had a murder at the beginning, a twist at the end, and a sleuth trying to figure it all out. There was mystery at the beginning and a big fight at the end. The only problem- I didn’t have nearly enough of a middle.

Writing the story, I realized that mystery novels need red herrings. Lots of them. They need lots of little avenues down which the sleuth can look, and the readers can speculate about. While I thought the big twist at the end was pretty satisfying, I found myself struggling to construct blind alleys in the middle of the story that weren’t obviously not the solution for the puzzle. I ended up struggling far more than I thought I would, got distracted by several other projects, and ended NaNoWriMo soundly defeated. I had less than 25,000 words, and I have no idea what I’m going to do with a semi-completed vampire mystery.

For whatever reason, though, I have decided to take it on next year. Now that binge-writing had defeated me once I (for irrational reasons of pride and insanity) have decided that I need to take it up again until I’m finally successful at it. Come next November, I’m going to be, yet again, attempting to generate vast quantities of bad fiction. Next time, NaNoWriMo. Next time.